Opinions
Labor rides a building backlash
By Dana Milbank Opinion writer May 21
I am proud to be a card-carrying member of Local 32035 of the Communications Workers of America.
It was not always thus. The Post is an open shop, and I dropped my membership several years ago when the
union was encouraging readers to cancel their subscriptions to protest some management action. I didn’t see
much sense in paying dues to accelerate the destruction of the newspaper business.
I don’t expect to gain much personally from rejoining the union faithful, because
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years. I signed up because income inequality, after years of worsening, has
reached a crisis — and the decline in union membership is partly to blame.
Rejoining the labor movement is my small, symbolic protest.
Depression, and the gap between the rich and the middle class is at its highest
since the government began keeping such statistics 30 years ago. After more than
three decades of income growth for the wealthiest 10 percent and stagnation for
everybody else, the top 3 percent now has more wealth than the bottom
90 percent.
And Americans are angry about it. The percentage of Americans who believe you can get ahead through hard
work has declined about 15 points over the past 15 years, according to polling by Gallup and the Pew Research
Center.
There are many causes of growing inequality — globalization, education disparities, tax policy — but an
International Monetary Fund study released in March found that the decline in union membership has been
responsible for half of the rise in the share of income going to the top 10 percent of earners in advanced
economies between 1980 and 2010. Declining union membership, by weakening the bargaining power of lowand middle-income workers at both union and nonunion businesses, has increased the share of wealth going to
corporate higher-ups and shareholders.
Straws in the wind suggest a building backlash. On Tuesday, Los Angeles approved a $15 minimum wage, joining
more than 17 states and several municipalities that have raised their minimum wages since 2013. Fast food and
retail employers, under pressure, have announced increases in low wages covering some 2 million workers.
Organized labor, in retreat for decades, has been reasserting itself within the Democratic Party. This week,
Philadelphia Democrats chose as their next mayor Jim Kenney, who had strong union backing in the primary
(and faces only token opposition in November). The come-from-behind victory for Kenney, who had been
outspent 3 to 1, follows similar long-shot wins for union-backed mayoral candidates in Boston and New York.
In Washington, pro-union Democrats, defying President Obama, put up a tougher-than-expected fight on trade
promotion authority legislation in the Senate, and it’s not clear that free-trade bills will pass the House.
Union membership, thanks to the likes of Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker (R), continues its long decline, but
impressions of labor have improved. Just four years ago, a plurality of Americans had an unfavorable view of
trade unions, but now the impression is 48 percent favorable to 39 percent unfavorable, according to Pew. Across
the country, some 5 million workers are negotiating contracts this year, the largest number for collective
bargaining in several years.
“They’ve been beaten down so much over the years that these American workers thought not losing was winning,
so they didn’t have any expectations,” AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka told a group of Post journalists
recently. “They’re getting way past that right now, and they have expectations, they have demands, they have
beliefs that they’re entitled to more.”
Trumka likens the moment to the Pullman strike of 1894, when workers, seeing their earnings shrink to
starvation levels after an economic depression, finally pushed back. “That’s like the point where we’re at right
now in this country: People are p---ed,” Trumka said.
That may be wishful thinking. But the obscene gap between the rich and everybody else pushed me to reconcile
with the union movement. My late grandfather was a labor lawyer and chief counsel to the Seafarers and other
unions; he taught me about collective bargaining over the dinner table. When I eulogized him after his death in
1997, I observed that his life had followed the arc of the labor movement: It peaked at mid-century when he was
in his prime and declined late in the century, as he did.
Eighteen years after his death, we can all see and feel the consequences of labor’s demise. For me and, I hope, for
others, it’s time for a homecoming.
Twitter: @Milbank
Read more from Dana Milbank’s archive, follow him on Twitter or subscribe to his updates on Facebook.
Read more:
Paul Waldman: The minimum wage movement wins its biggest victory yet
Robert Samuelson: The ‘low-wage job recovery’ myth
Harold Meyerson: What it will take to revive the middle class
Katrina vanden Heuvel: The emerging populist agenda
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